E795 | The Importance of Compounding Schedules

Why Your PT Clinic Needs 50-60% Recurring Visits to Scale

The Fastest Way to Grow a PT Clinic? More Recurring Patients.

Hiring your first PT is exciting—but getting them busy can feel painfully slow. Some clinics take 2 months to fill a new clinician’s schedule. Others take 8 months. The difference?

👉 They track and optimize continuity visits.

If 50-60% of your visits come from returning patients, your clinic will grow 4x faster than one constantly chasing new leads. Here’s why.

1. More Continuity = Less Pressure to Find New Patients

Scenario A: 10% Retention Rate
📌 Start with 10 new patients per month
📌 1 out of 10 stays for ongoing care
📌 After 12 months, only 12 recurring patients
📌 You STILL need 30+ new patients every month to stay full

Scenario B: 60% Retention Rate
📌 Start with 10 new patients per month
📌 6 out of 10 stay for ongoing care
📌 After 12 months, 72 recurring patients
📌 You only need a few new evals each month to stay fully booked

If your clinicians aren’t busy, it’s not a marketing problem—it’s a retention problem.

2. The Champagne Tower Effect: How to Scale Faster

🍾 Imagine a champagne tower at a wedding.
🥂 The top glass (your senior clinician) fills first.
💦 Once full, the overflow pours into the glasses below (new hires).

High continuity = automatic schedule filling for your team.

Clinics with 50-60% continuity visits can hire faster, scale smoother, and avoid constant lead-chasing.

3. How to Improve Continuity & Stop the "One & Done" Cycle

✔ Offer structured wellness, maintenance, or performance plans
✔ Clearly communicate long-term care benefits to patients
✔ Schedule follow-ups before patients "graduate"
✔ Educate patients on why stopping too soon = wasted progress
✔ Make retention a clinic-wide KPI & track your numbers

If every patient only sees you 3x on average, you’re working way too hard. Fix this now and your clinic will grow effortlessly.

Final Thoughts: Start Tracking & Fixing This Today

✅ If 50-60% of your visits come from recurring patients, you win.
✅ If you're stuck at 10-20%, your growth is going to be painfully slow.
✅ Fix your retention now so every new hire gets busy—fast.

📅 Want help figuring out YOUR numbers? Book a free business assessment → Click Here

🚀 Join the PT Entrepreneur Facebook Group → Click Here

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Ready to elevate your practice? Book a call at the link below with one of our expert consultants today and start your journey to delivering unparalleled physical therapy.

Podcast Transcript

Danny: 

 Hey, real quick, if you were serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country. And it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.

Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skill set in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matta. And over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.

I've been a staff PT. I've been an active duty military officer, physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice. And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale their own cash practices So if this sounds like something you want to do listen up because i'm here to help you What's going on?

Dr. Danny here with the pti store podcast and I got a question for you. Have you hired somebody? And if you have, how long did it take you to get their schedule busy? This is a question that frustrates the heck out of pretty much anybody that hires a, another clinician, especially the first clinician that you bring on.

And one thing that you can track that will make a massive difference between somebody's schedule being busy within two months and somebody taking. Eight months for their schedule to be busy is your percentage of continuity. Now, this comes off the back of a conversation I had with a friend of mine, Jeremy DuPont, who owns a marketing company called Patch.

And this company does digital marketing for cash and hybrid based clinics all over the country. They work with a few hundred clinics and, um, and, and what they do, partially, part of what they do is to build, build out a, uh, a CRM, um, tool on the back end that tracks a lot of, Uh, data within practices because a lot of E.

M. R. S. They didn't actually do a very good job of tracking business metrics. They'll track like clinic metrics, but not necessarily really, really important business metrics. So, you know, for us to have visibility in what we want to see, we have to build this in other tools. That are really designed to run businesses.

So for Jeremy, you know, as he's building these out, there's a certain, uh, sort of number of data points that, that we get a chance to look at and see, oh, wow, this really correlates well to somebody adding another staff member quickly. And when you hire somebody, it's very challenging to get their schedule.

You know, up and running quickly, but there's one, there's one variable that makes a massive difference. And it's the number, the percentage of continuity or recurring visits that you have on your schedule, uh, that allows you to then not need as many new patients. So, so here's what happens. Let's say that, um, like one out of 10 people that I work with sticks around to work with me.

Okay, so let's say I see 10 people first month, then I have one person that's sticking around 10 people, the second month, one more person sticks around, that's two people. If I do that for the entire year, all of a sudden, at the end of the year, I have 12 people that I'm working with. Assuming nobody has dropped off 12 people that I'm working with on an ongoing basis.

Now, 12 people, uh, if I want to say a full schedule is 120 visits in a month, I'm 10 percent of the way there. Okay. Now let's take that same scenario, but let's say instead of 10 percent or one person sticks around, now all of a sudden six people are 60 percent stick around. So by the end of the year, I have 72 people.

So six people per month stick around times. 12 months. And that gives me 72 people. Well, if I need to get my schedule to 120 visits, I'm, I'm at 72 to start the month. Now I don't have to find that many new P that many new people. I may only need a couple of those initially, uh, new patients to do evals with in order for my schedule to hit where I want to be.

What does that mean? Well, now I have spillover into somebody else's calendar. That spillover builds their schedule up faster. Assuming they're doing the same thing. So, when we look at these metrics, the clinics that could be at 50 to 60 percent of continuity visits, of recurring visits, they snowball their schedules astronomically faster than clinics that are 10 20%.

And this is with the same amount of initial lead flow, by the way. And we know, like, really, one of the hardest things to do is to get a new person in the door to get a new, a new patient. And you're working really hard to get that new patient in the door, but then you have nothing for them to continue to work with you on, even if they want to.

You have nothing to offer them and this is the frustration we see with a lot of clinicians that feel like they're constantly having to get more and more and more new patients, but they never ever seem to hit a threshold where, uh, they, they're not just constantly playing the eat what you kill game, which is hard to do and even harder to scale past yourself.

I know because when, when we ran our clinic and when I first got started by myself, I would have many months where I would have 30 plus new patients, 30 new patients in a month. And I would barely be hitting, um, you know, a hundred visits, uh, in a month is insane. That, that means that my, my average with people was like three visits.

And so I had to find another 30 new people every single month. That's so hard to do. And honestly, 30 people. That should be equivalent to three to four staff members schedules being full. If you're doing a good job of keeping people around and giving them something else to do. So one metric you should be tracking and you should know this really well is what percent of your schedule is coming in on a recurring basis, reoccurring basis.

They're not new. They're coming back to work with you and tracking that number. And really trying to push that number up to 50, 60 percent because it's going to help you then snowball your other clinic or clinician schedules, as well as create schedules stability for them so that they don't have to have quite as many new people, new patients each month either.

And then it spills over to the next one and the next one. It's sort of like, it's like you're filling up a bucket of water and underneath it. You know, there's other buckets of water that then get filled up by the overflow from the first one. Or it's like the little champagne pyramid that they have at Weddings, right?

You pour the champagne in the top and then it spills out over into all the other champagne glasses below it. It's the same thing. You just have to keep in mind that the more continuity you have, the more spills over into everybody else. The less new visits that you need or your more senior clinicians need because their schedules are very dense with people that are coming back in.

So keep that in mind. 50 to 60 percent is what you want to shoot for. If you're not tracking that. Please make sure you're tracking it. If you want to learn more about the numbers you should be tracking or are frankly just how to run your business the right way and you're tired of figuring out all by yourself, head to physical therapy, biz.

com. Take a look at what we're doing. We have a ton of free resources on there at resources. You can check out a bunch of case studies and if it feels right, pick a time to chat with our, one of our advisors and we can see, you know, what your business is all about, take you through our, uh, assessment. We actually dig into your business and we look at you benchmarked to the hundreds of businesses that we work with and let you know exactly what you need to work on.

And. If it makes sense for us to help you get where you're trying to go faster, we can talk to you about that as well. As always, thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next week.

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